Recently I watched as a pre-school teacher was trying to get a child to help with cleaning up a pile of toys. She said that she would put them away on the shelves if he brought them over to her. He began bringing them one by one and the teacher put them on the shelves. However, to make them fit, she soon needed to rearrange them. With every new toy she needed to rearrange again and again. If the child had put all the toys in a nearby wagon and brought  them over at once, both the teacher and child would have completed the task much more quickly.

This phenomenon happens frequently in the design world. For many reasons, designers don’t get all the toys at once and we end up “rearranging” over and over again. Frequently, there are good reasons for this. Usually, there is an assumption that the job will get done more quickly if the designer is given ten percent of the information to “get him/her started.” As the example above illustrates, most of the time, that is not a correct assumption.

Years of experience in the design world have taught me one important truth: if I start a project with the content and information in an organized package, the result is better, the cost is lower and the project is completed more quickly.

What does an organized creative project look like?

• A concise description of intent
• A description of the target audience
• A listing of historic considerations
• A clear definition of the scope of the project.

What does an organized production project look like?

• A clear, detailed description of the project including deliverables, deliverable sizes, and all deliverable attributes.
• A hierarchy of what is the most important down to least important
• All the assets (images, graphics, required fonts, text content) or clear descriptions of stock images to be searched for.
• Any existing corporate brand standards

If the above is presented in an organized package, here is what is gained:

• Time and money savings: The project can be completed much more quickly with less time spent on endless email threads
• A better product: The design does not need to be patched up to squeeze in those last minute items.
• A more creative project: Designers can focus on designing rather than sorting through emails looking for content, etc.
• Happy clients: Clients can move on to other projects, confident that their project will be well designed, on time, on budget.

All this sounds great, right? So why is it not done more?

• MULTIPLE PLAYERS within the client’s company – all contributing on different schedules
• WORKING STYLES – some people like to see a framework so that they can then fill in the “blanks”
• HABITS – some people just get in the habit of handing off one element at a time.

How to move toward a more perfect world?

• The MULTIPLE PLAYER situation – Clients can identify all players in a project and their roles up front and define one leader. Then the leader can partner with the agency account executive to organize, drive and manage the project.
• The WORKING STYLE situation -  Agency account executives can paint picture of how different requests can add unnecessary hours. They can make recommendations on how to organize the gathering of information to minimize costs. Personality traits or insights of all parties should be shared with the account executive so he or she can better manage communications.
• The HABIT situation – Not gathering all information early on is costly because the designer ends up spending a lot of time organizing and reorganizing the content, keeping track of what is still missing, and reading through multiple emails looking for content. By working closely with the agency account executive at the planning stage, this can be easily avoided. He or she will organize the job with a systematic approach to save time and money.

Most important take-aways?

• Gather all content up front
• Spend time with your agency account executive up front, as you would with an architect to streamline the work flow of a project and optimize the  timeline, budget and deliverable quality.